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The bee-bee of wool lint is there, a few inches off from the shell. He had aimed at the shell, earlier, and missed. He had aimed and shot the bee-bee off his finger with his thumb when he realized precisely the moment he had lost control of his audience, that the walls came down, so to speak, and that moment was when he stopped teaching and took on the role of Dean. From that point forward his audience of students had choices, freer choices at any rate, as to what they would listen to and what they would pretend to listen to. There were, after all, no tests they would be required to take. The control had slipped from him to them. They joined the vast ocean of Others—all those Others about whom he was never absolutely sure. Like the sounds the young woman had made.
The landlord’s gray cat moves along the patio wall, tail held nearly straight up, show-offish, as if the tail could, if the cat so desired, hold a fancy umbrella in the manner of tightrope walkers. Amelia, he recalls, when she so desired, held him in conversation in a like manner, and when they made love he felt his ribcage open and close back around her so that they were one moving body. How could that be how could that be? He picks up the small ball and this time his aim is true. Of course, of course, he is misremembering the moments. And her name is there in his head because her name is on the sub-let contract they both signed a few weeks past. His memory is close to photographic on all things written.
Sometime in the night or just before morning the young woman returns and spends time with him before seeking out the narrow daybed in the main room. A wind picks up over the Aegean and the bee-bee, for all its compact and hard little presence, is swept out of the shell and over the cliff into the cauldera. If he had been listening, he might have heard its all but inaudible whisper of hardened wool against air as it fell; some unspoken test might have been passed; all the thoughts he’d rolled into that wooly lint ball might have actually said something, meant something, if he had been listening.
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[word count 391] [end] [home]
